Saturday, July 11, 2015

Guitar Sanctuary: Washburn® MG-70 (Pt.1 Before)

We found this old Washburn® on Ebay that looked in need of a spruce up. After a few bids we got it and set about to breathing some new life into it.

When it arrived we saw that the paint was in a pretty poor state. We suspect the previous owner had done a DIY refinish as the original specs for this stated it had a Purple metal flake finish with a flamed maple veneer.

Oddly the back of the guitar had quite a thick lacquer, compared with the front which had none. There were also these two large Jagermeister® stickers on the front and back. The later was covering both the bridge and control cavity covers.

This wasn't the best idea as you'd then be unable to adjust the bridge or open the control cavity without first having to remove the sticker.

Flipping the guitar over, the owner had also tried their hand at changing the pickups.

Strangely, the single coils were packed in with rolled up bits of newspaper. We assume this was to act as some kind of height adjustment but it's a bit of a mystery.

Here's a bit of a closer look at what we mean by DIY finish.

You can also see that the hardware has not been cleaned or properly maintained.

So what to do with this guitar? We were originally just going to tidy it up and give it a service/set up but seeing the state it's in we decided we'd fully strip all the old finish off, clean up all the hardware and set about making this into something a bit different.

Click here for Part 2, showing all the in progress work and Part 3 for the final results!

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